Art Show Looks at Los Angeles's Underside

By BERNARD WEINRAUB,

Published: March 4, 1992

LOS ANGELES, March 3—
On the opening night of "Helter-Skelter: L.A. Art in the 1990's," the most provocative art show in Los Angeles in years, 10,000 people showed up and there was a near-riot at the entrance. Since then, the exhibition, a showcase of 16 Los Angeles artists at the Museum of Contemporary Art's warehouse-style annex, has not only lured big crowds, but also stirred anger, applause, astonishment.

What is, perhaps, especially startling about the perverse, ambitious, often bleakly funny show by artists ranging in age from their early 20's to late 50's is its attempt to explore the unique culture of Los Angeles and address what Paul Schimmel, the museum's 37-year-old chief curator, calls "the darker angst-ridden side of contemporary life" here that has little to do with the stereotypes of the city as a cultural wasteland or a sunny, hedonistic playground. He said the show, which opened in late January and will run until April 26, "has succeeded beyond our wildest expectations."

He added, "It has hit a nerve within the community that has surprised me." The museum, Mr. Schimmel said, "wanted to focus on a certain kind of narrative, a certain kind of creative energy, a certain kind of iconoclastic art." The show's art, he said, was loud and raucous, with many of the artists drawing their inspiration from cartoons, rock-and-roll, extremist politics and pulp literature.

The splashy show occupies 45,000 square feet of gallery space near Little Tokyo in downtown Los Angeles in the museum's Temporary Contemporary annex designed by Frank Gehry, at 152 Central Avenue. It is several blocks from the elegant museum on California Plaza, and some critics have chided Mr. Schimmel as not having wanted to defile the classy main museum, designed by Arata Isozaki, with some sordid and bleak works of art.

Such criticisms annoy Mr. Schimmel. "It gives people an opportunity to make a snide remark about the Isozaki building," he said.

"Besides," he said, pointing to several huge pieces, such as "Medusa's Head," Chris Burden's five-ton sculpture, "this exhibition could not have taken place anywhere else, in terms of the size, the scale, the ability to bring in heavy machinery and completely alter the environment."

One of the most provocative, even unsettling, elements of the show is its title, "Helter-Skelter," which instantly recalls the Charles Manson murders of 1969.

"There's a double meaning in those words," said Mr. Schimmel, a Syracuse University graduate who received a master's degree from New York University's Institute of Fine Arts in 1981 who later worked as senior curator at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston and curator at the Newport Harbor Art Museum in California before taking his current job two years ago.

"For one thing, helter-skelter is a kind of fun ride; it has a topsy-turvy disorienting quality to it," he said. "And it's very specifically loaded in terms of the way it was associated with an alternative part of the 60's and a shocking event that altered people's perceptions of what Los Angeles was about."

The disorder at the heart of the show is underscored in a catalogue that includes some violent and explicit poetry and fiction by 10 of the city's underground writers. And the museum as well as the artists have pointed out out that the show is hardly an isolated cultural event, but draws on links to literary Los Angeles, and the writings of Raymond Chandler and Nathanael West, as well as 1940's film noir and such movie classics about the city as "Chinatown," and "Blade Runner."

But it is the visual artists who, of course, dominate the show.

The artists include 57-year-old Llyn Foulkes, who merges macabre comic imagery with bleak themes; the 46-year-old Mr. Burden, whose "Medusa's Head," a grotesque hanging ball of model trains, rocks, concrete and steel that depicts a grimy, decaying landscape, was shown last year at the Brooklyn Museum, and 38-year-old Charles Ray, who constructs impersonal, nude mannequins.

There is also Robert Williams, 48, a comic-book artist whose fantasy works are popular in the rock-music industry, and Paul McCarthy's "Garden," in which mechanical men copulate with trees or holes in the ground.

There are also such well-known artists as 37-year-old Mike Kelley, whose jokey murals for the show were initially conceived for a local advertising agency building designed by Mr. Gehry, and a rising newcomer, Philippine-born Manuel Ocampo, 26, who weaves grotesque, catastrophic religious images.

To the museum's amazement, however, the one work that has caused the most unease among viewers is "Queenright," an installation by 31-year-old Liz Larner involving a swarm of live bees in a glass case. "Despite all the nudity and everything else, that's the one that upsets the most people," said Mr. Schimmel. "They get upset because the bees die and they collect at the bottom of the case. We change it every week. It upsets people because you're using a living being for a work of art."

Perhaps the strongest criticism of the show is that, as L.A. Weekly, a widely-read paper, observed, it "avoids more issues than it confronts head on, and avoids the politics and esthetics of race and class." The show has also been criticized for not being politically correct: only four of the artists are women, none of the artists are black and some of the works depict women (like men) in outrageous fantasies.

Mr. Schimmel said: "I never attempted to cover all aspects of what was going on in Los Angeles. It's not a show about multi-culturalism. It's not an exhibition about abstractionism or video arts or performing arts. It is not meant to define all aspects of Los Angeles today. Instead it's trying to define an aspect with a certain clarity." He added that 7 of the 16 artists were either women or members of minorities.

"It's an in-your-face show, confrontational, charged," said Mr. Schimmel. "In the same way that Symbolist painting at the turn of the century, and Surrealism and Pop Art have always reached out to an audience beyond the art world, the primary focus of this exhibition moves in the same direction. People are moved or provoked or startled on a very human level. The fact is, we really must define who we are here if ultimately we want the rest of the world to perceive us as something other than an entertainment capital. We can't let New York or Dusseldorf define us."

Photo: Paul Schimmel of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, standing before Nancy Rubins's "Trailers and Hot Water Heaters." (Steve Goldstein for The New York Times)